FOLDING MYSTERY INTO THE ORDINARY
December 10,2006 The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
I’ve told you before, I’m sure, that when I was a young girl, I was allowed to play the part of the Virgin Mary one year in our church’s annual Christmas pageant. As I recall, the girl who was supposed to play the part got sick, and I was the next in line. It was, of course, considered a great honor to land the part of the mother of Jesus – though I don’t think I had any lines to say. All that was required of me was to sit there and gaze adoringly at the baby Jesus – which was simply a doll in a wooden manger.
In looking back, however, I’m wondering why these pageants never seemed to include the beginning of the Christmas story – the Annunciation, where Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel who announces that she is to bear a child, and that this child will be the Son of God, and Savior of the world. That would have been a much more interesting scene!
For here’s this young girl – probably no older than 15 or 16, waiting to be married to a much older man, as was the custom in those ancient times. All we know about Mary is that she was poor and humble, living a simple life. According to the story, she’s never had intimate relationships with Joseph or any other man: She has been chosen by God to give birth to the long-awaited Messiah. She is both fearful and awed by it.
Probably no different from any other young woman throughout the ages experiencing her first pregnancy.
Still, I doubt that many of us here believe the Biblical account. Indeed, I think that most Bible scholars see the details as myth – as metaphor for larger universal truths. They may not question the actual birth of Jesus, or that his parents were a young maiden and an older carpenter, and that they lived in the town of Nazareth. But that Mary was a virgin, and was impregnated by “the Spirit of the Lord?”
Here’s what I suspect happened: This young maiden had had sexual relations with a man – perhaps Joseph, perhaps some Roman soldier; maybe it was consensual, but more likely, I suppose, it was against her will.
Whatever the circumstances, she found herself pregnant before her marriage to Joseph; and because he was a good man, Joseph decided to go ahead with the marriage in order to spare Mary the social ostracism that would certainly have resulted otherwise.
I suspect that Mary felt terrible shame and guilt. But perhaps in the darkness of the night, in the stillness of her heart, she heard a soft voice from deep within herself, telling her that she need not be afraid – that indeed, she should be joyful, for her child was as worthy and as holy as any child born. Perhaps Mary’s divine wisdom informed her that her child was a child of God – a spark of the eternal Spirit of Life – with the same potential as every child to become a savior of the world.
Writer Kathleen Norris suggests that “perhaps every woman feels this with her first pregnancy, caught up in something so much larger than herself. A mystery; something holy, with the potential for salvation.”
And so Mary, like any young mother, began the long wait for the birth of her child, pondering, we are told, the mystery of it all. During this season of Advent, which began last Sunday, whether we are Christians or not, whether we believe the story as written or not, we are all invited to enter into a period of waiting for the birth of new life, and to ponder the mystery of it all.
But that is not always easy to do.
At a workshop a couple of months ago, parents of our children in our Religious Education program were asked what they hoped their children would receive in the program. One young father said that he hoped his children would experience “mystery folded into the ordinary.”
When I asked him later what he’d meant by that, he explained, in part, that “there is so much in this world that we try to capture, label, contain and possess….The slow path of knowledge and wisdom are replaced with headlines, soundbites, and Google searches. Human interaction and discourse is replaced with text messaging.”
Instead, he said, “the virtues of not having to understand everything we experience are embodied in the language of magic, miracles and mysteries. It’s those moments that defy logic and reason where we feel touched by the divine…. What I want to celebrate with my children,” he said, is “the magic of unanswered questions and whispered miracles everywhere.”
We Unitarian Universalists tend to spend so much energy debunking the miraculous stories of the season – be they about the birth of Jesus, or the oil burning in the Temple for eight days, or the kidnapping of Persephone by Hades that brought on the harshness of winter – that we don’t allow ourselves to hear them simply as stories about the mystery and wonder of all that surrounds us.
We live in a world full of chaos and stress, which is only heightened at this time of year. Rather than slowing down and experiencing the wonder of the season, we’re caught up in a frenzy of commercialism and busyness. Even for those of us who relish the holidays, we’re always aware of how much more we still have to do (– except for those of you who have the audacity to announce soon after Thanksgiving that you’ve already finished all of your holiday shopping and have even gotten it in the mail!)
Just yesterday my daughter asked me if we could just go to a restaurant for Christmas dinner this year because she doesn’t feel up to preparing one. (The last time we tried that, we ended up at Denny’s!) This child who loves to cook and entertain has become overwhelmed, like many of us, by the stresses of life and of the season.
Yet, these 4 weeks known as Advent, as well as the eight days of Hanukkah, suggests that we need to take time to pay attention to the beautiful details of life, and marvel at our place in the wonder of it all. This is the time of year when we are called to open ourselves to the holiness, and allow that experience in. It is now that we most need to know, at the deepest level, the Love that is born over and over, connecting us to all that is.
Annie Dillard, in an essay called “Seeing,” tells of how as a child she would from time to time hide a penny at the roots of a large tree, or in a crack in the sidewalk, for someone else to find. She would draw with chalk huge arrows pointing to the penny. And when she learned to write, she’d even label these arrows, “Surprise Ahead” or “Money This Way.” She never waited around to see if anyone found the pennies; it was enough, she says, to think “of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe.”
“The world is fairly studded and strewn,” Dillard goes on to say, “with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.” All we need do, she implies, is “keep our eyes open” and follow the arrows. It is like opening each day the windows of an advent calendar and delighting in the surprise awaiting us.
I am reminded of driving into Yosemite with my son when he was around 10 or 12 years old. He’d never been there, and he wasn’t much looking forward to the trip. He’d spent several vacations in Big Sur, and he figured that was about as good as it gets.
But as we made the ascent up the mountain, we suddenly rounded a curve, and there ahead of us was a Yosemite waterfall cascading down the mountainside. I heard a gasp from Garrett. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “That’s much better than Big Sur!”
We’d followed the arrows provided by “a generous hand” and were rewarded with one of the many gifts of creation.
The Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, writes that “people think of walking on water as a miracle; but the real miracle is walking on earth. Every day,” he suggests, “we are engaged in miracles we don’t recognize: the blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, curious eyes of a child….” These are all “pennies cast broadside by a generous hand,” as Dillard suggests.
I think of how often I have beautiful music playing on my radio or CD player, yet barely hear any of it because I’m “multi-tasking” all over the place. I need to more often remember the program I saw on TV a number of years ago, about some new surgery that would allow deaf people to hear. The program featured a girl – perhaps in her teens – who had been deaf from a very early age – perhaps even from birth, I don’t now remember. They showed her after the surgery, wearing a pair of earphones. And for this child who had never experienced the sound of music before, they began playing a recording of a Beethoven symphony. The look on the girl’s face was one of stunned awe and pure joy. It was a magnificent moment, both for her and for those witnessing it, of tapping into the wonder and the miraculousness of the universe.
But experiencing the wonder and mystery of life doesn’t only occur in large, dramatic moments such as that. In Marilyn Robinson’s novel, Gilead, the narrator of the story – a Congregationalist minister – tells his young son that “Existence (is) the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.” This he writes after witnessing some old oak trees dropping acorns: “It is all still new to me,” he says. “I’ve lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.”
That is what this season offers us: The reminder that we only need to open our eyes and pay attention, for the smallest, most ordinary detail of existence to “astonish” us still.
Thich Nhat Hanh encourages us to pay attention to the present moment, even if that’s only eating a tangerine, or washing the dishes, or drinking a cup of tea. We are so accustomed these days to “multi-tasking” that we often don’t even notice the taste of what we’re eating, or the warmth of the water as we’re showering, or the softness of the child’s hand we are holding. We’re usually simply thinking of the next thing on our mental list of things to do.
This season of Advent and of Hanukkah – which begins Friday night – is a season for opening ourselves to and waiting for the Mystery to unfold in the ordinary and not-so-ordinary events of our lives. It is a time for what monastics call “attentive waiting” – taking the time to be still, to listen and to look more deeply than we are accustomed to doing. It is a time, as the mother of Jesus knew, to “ponder” the Mystery and our place in it all.
This afternoon I will unpack all of my Christmas and Hanukkah decorations and begin placing them around my home. It will be a mixture of candles, Menorahs, Santa Clauses, and dreidels. I will be surprised by forgotten trinkets, and delighted by ornaments made by my children many years ago. But the best part will be the unpacking of the crèche – the hand-carved Nativity scene given to my mother by the priest who made it, soon after I was born. I will place each figure with great care and reverence, and remember the wonder it offered each Advent of my childhood.
And when I am finished, I will sit quietly and marvel at it all. I will begin my “attentive waiting” for the magic and mystery of the season to unfold. And I will remain hopeful that the message of peace and love that the birth of that tiny baby heralded so long ago, will be reborn in the hearts of all people everywhere, no matter their religion, this Advent season.
“How do we prepare for the unknown, the unannounced, the thing we can’t even imagine?” asks Gail Godwin in her novel, Evensong. “We make ourselves ready; we light our candles, we say ‘Welcome,’ and then we compose ourselves and wait for the knock at the door.”
May each of us find the time this season to “compose ourselves,” to invite the Mystery and Wonder into our lives, quietly and patiently “wait for the knock of Love at the door,” and then open it and say “Welcome. We have been waiting for you.
Amen.
© 2006 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
